Studio 2: The Walking Tour

Assignment Description:

Select a path you often pass by on your way to school or any other place in the city. Focus on a particular issue, topic or phenomenon, possible topics can include gentrification, public art and public space, activism, gendered space, poverty, cosmopolitanism, mobility, and health and illness. You could also create a walking tour focused on a particular sense, such as smell, test, or sound. Select five stations for your tour. For each station, include a photograph and explain at each of these stops what you would say as a guide.

 

Assignment:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1TjzWqzB7raaxq6uUCpBotoYd0MBvsI2m

 

Reflection:

The route I chose is the path on 14th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenue. I pass this street on my way to school and its also the place that houses almost all of the food places I go to on a daily basis. Hence, I chose 5 of my most visited places on this street as my 5 stations – ‘The Halal Guys’, ‘T-swirl crepes’, ‘I-Hop’, ‘Beyond Sushi’ and ‘Gong Cha Tea’. I chose these places because I want to focus on the proliferation of consumerism in the food industry in the public space. For consumers convenience is everything, so having several food stores all at a minute’s distance from your house increases the likelihood of their consumption of goods, hence boosting the market. Hence, this walking tour shows how our public space is so dominated by consumerism.

In the video, I have purposely addressed the stations not in chronological order to show how this abundance of choices can often be confusing to me, and I’ve kept the tone of the commentary informal because the format of the video was aimed to resemble a tour that I would give to a friend to familiarise them with the area and their food options. I noticed that on the walking tour, a lot of elements hit you all at once and it gets hard to focus on just one. There is always an influx of entities to consider hence making it difficult to address one in great detail. I could only give a little information about one station before having to move on to another. The comments only focus on ‘how good’ the food place is, when they’re open till, what find of food they serve or what their ‘best’ item is, because these are the only things that concern a consumer. Hence, this provokes the audience to identify the aspects that they subconsciously focus on when interacting with a public space.

 

The 5 Stations:

 

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